Hallelujah a vignette
by LeFae
Summary: I wrote this about eighteen months ago, when I first started to watch The West Wing. It's a short piece and it's essentially a post-ep for Holy Night, but it was written when I first saw Posse Comitatus. I was still crying, in fact.


It was a quiet, elegant song, and it had the power to take his breath away each time he heard it. So many images rolled through his mind each time, so many memories evoked, so much emotion unspent. It was never long enough to last throughout, coaxing the response it created in him to its natural conclusion, so it was on repeat. As the last chords died, he waited for the soft click and whirr of the CD player as it transported him back to the beginning again.

_I've heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord, but you don't really care for music do you?_

Schubert it might not be, but it was quiet and unassuming and provocative. _The minor fall and the major lift. _So many ups and downs along the way. Was this how it was meant to go? One step forward, two steps back? He sat forward in the easy chair, his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands. _The baffled King composing Hallelujah_…

"We talk about enemies more than we used to," he could hear his own voice saying. It had been a non sequitur at the time, or so he thought, but now it weighed heavily on him. It was no longer good enough to throw their caps over the wall and try and chase them. There were more walls, not enough caps, and they were under constant fire. Was it not enough that they were trying to do good?

_Your faith was strong but you needed proof.._ Hell, yes, he needed it. He needed to know that they would leave something behind, something stronger than the memory of an assassination scandal and a President who lied about his illness. Faith would take you so far, but after a while you questioned what it was that kept you going, what it was that you were devoting your life and soul to, and whether or not it was worth it. He wanted to leave a political legacy that others could see and appreciate, because everyone wants to leave their mark and he knew no other way he could do so.

_She tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne, she cut your hair, and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah…_

He remembered that night in Amy's apartment after the Welfare Bill had gone through and she was reeling from the fact that Josh had fought every bit as hard as she had, pulled no punches, and had won. Amy was jobless and raging because he had compromised on marriage incentives. He had chosen to try and tie the party together rather than get the votes from the right, and she had been shocked when it worked. For some reason he couldn't make her see that the more votes he took from Ritchie's supporters, the more compromises he'd have had to make.

He remembered the smell of the meal she was cooking, just as he remembered the dark living room and the red top she was wearing. He remembered the way the phone had rung in the middle of the shouting, and the bombshell that was dropped. The way Amy had stepped back from him as he took the phone, her hand fluttering to the glass of Scotch she was holding, unable to reach for him the way he knew she wanted to because _they'd made it so damn political_ and were in the midst of a stupid fight. Because she had backed him up against a wall and she knew it, and now she couldn't bring herself to touch him because she wasn't sure if he would brush her away. To his intense disappointment, he knew he would have.

CJ. If anyone understood the way he was feeling right now it would be her. To others it might be a job, but to the two of them.. Lives had been threatened and lost, and nobody had felt that more strongly than CJ and himself. Fourteen hours of surgery and months of rehabilitation to repair his pulmonary artery. The funeral of someone she might have been able to love. To lose someone who had been there, been through the events at Rosslyn, understood what they had seen, what they had felt, someone who could understand, without being told, that there was a piece of CJ that would always remain at Rosslyn, because there was a piece of him there too. Simon had been on the President's detail that night. Josh knew that everyone had been through hell, but he hadn't been the one who was paid to stand in front of the bullet on _purpose_, and he hadn't ever had to take a life with his own hands. There would be no way of explaining it to someone who hadn't been there, hadn't seen it. He imagined it was something like shell shock in battle-fatigued soldiers.

_Maybe I've been here before, I know this room, I've walked this floor. _

The ineffable sadness was threatening to overwhelm him. His whole life, he had never felt this alone. Politics was an ugly game, a dirty, disreputable game, but he had thrived on playing, and playing hard. Was he getting old, or were his priorities changing because of the cumulative effects of Rosslyn, of New York, of the President's fallibility?

He had sat with CJ, talked to her, held her as she cried for Simon, and he wondered who would have cried for him if that night at the Newseum had ended differently. He counted his colleagues as friends, but he doubted that he could name ten people who would shed tears at his funeral. And none who would cry like CJ had cried for Simon.

_I used to live alone before I knew you. _

But he was still alone, and the glass of red wine was getting low. He reached for the bottle on the table beside the sofa, and topped the glass off. _Love is not a victory march, it's cold and it's a broken Hallelujah._

That was what Amy hadn't understood, that he hadn't been able to keep out of their relationship. "I can't make decisions based on the fact that I like your smooth skin," he had told her. She had quietened, touched for once by something beyond her political instincts, but he had been nervous anyway, waiting for her to snap back into work mode. It was competitive, everything was tied to politics, and their bickering over policy spilled over into their home life. Everything he did was tied to his career in some way, and he had thrived on that at one time, so what was different? When had he changed? When had he decided that not everything was about winning or losing, not everything had to be about his political affiliations or the latest bill or _fighting_?

_Hallelujah, hallelujah. Hallelujah, hallelujah... There was a time you'd let me know what's really going on below, but now you never show it to me do you?_

His heavy mind turned to the Washington Inn. He hoped she was having fun.

Reese seemed like a decent man, not one of her usual chain of jerks, but he kept coming back to how they'd met. Her accidental vote for every Republican on the ballot, his initial disbelief the way she'd fronted up outside the polling booth. Sam had gone to visit her, and he'd told Josh the story. She was asking everyone who walked past to swap votes with her. She had been there for hours, desperate not to let the side down, desperate for anyone with the same sense of honour as she had displayed every day he'd known her to take pity on her situation and help her.

Reese had listened to her story and done the right thing by her. For that, Josh owed him grudging respect, but he was still a Republican. The only reason he could have helped her in the first place was because he was a _Republican_. He could see the fights he had had with Amy intensified a hundred fold between Donna and Jack, because Donna had an innate sense of right and wrong, and he hoped to God that would never change. He didn't want that for her. The arguments and the frustration. He hoped she'd learn from his mistakes, but he didn't know how to tell her. His past track record for disparaging her dates was going to taint any effort he made to tell her his fears. And what business of his was it, anyway?

_I remember when I moved in you, the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah.._

He wondered how Donna had felt after Rosslyn. He knew she had stayed near him all of that night, and for most of the following days, going home or to the office as necessary but spending her waking moments with him, watching over him, being there for him. Doing her job. No, he knew she'd gone above and beyond, but couldn't tell… was that her overdeveloped sense of duty, her insatiable need to do better, try harder than everyone else to compensate for her lack of a past in this arena, or was she there because of _him_? And 'him' the man or 'him' her boss? He didn't know. He knew that they had grown close during those weeks when he had been rehabilitating at home, when she had guarded his privacy so jealously that the others had complained bitterly when she finally allowed them access. He also knew he had pushed her away, hard, in the following months. The same way he would have pushed Amy away if she'd tried to touch him that night, when he'd heard of Simon's death.

He wondered who had been there, who _was_ there for Donna when she needed to let off steam, the way he'd been letting off steam yelling at her for the last few years.

_Maybe there's a God above, and all I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you_.

Amy. Joey. Mandy. All his relationships with women were based on banter, on repartee, on who could fire back the quickest, sharpest retort. God, the first time he'd met Joey she'd almost torn him apart. He might not have been attracted to her until later on, but he had quickly appreciated her intensity and commitment. Mandy's tongue was as quick as her temper, and then there was Amy.

The only reason he didn't list Donna in that group was her sometime habit of not firing back a retort. Sometimes she would, metaphorically speaking, roll over and show a flash of soft belly. Oh, she could bully him worse than any of the others, but she did it gently, with a degree of finesse and infinite caring. Maybe that's why she was an assistant rather than a player, like the others. Well, that and the fact she hadn't finished college yet. The others all had harder edges to them. Donna was.. Donna had naivety. Donna had a gentle spirit to her that he wouldn't like to see crushed with too much political grandstanding or bickering. _It's not a cry you can hear at night, it's not somebody who's seen the light, it's cold and it's a broken Hallelujah. _That's how it would be for Donna and Jack. He could see it so clearly it might as well be flashing in neon above their heads. Jack mightn't be the brash, outspoken political pit bull that Josh had sometimes been described as, but he was still the master of his own mind, his own opinions. He didn't ever want to hear that cold or broken disillusionment coming from Donna.

The hallelujahs were bleeding into each other now as the street light outside fell across into the unlit living room. The heavy drapes weren't drawn but the thinner curtains softened the glow so it spilled across the hardwood floors in patches. He couldn't remember how many times he had played the song over, but he waited for it to boot up again. He looked at the wine glass in his hand and drained it. The hangover would be heinous, but he didn't care right now. He hoped Donna was having a good time. He hoped he could find a way to protect her from the inevitable.

_Hallelujah, hallelujah. _

_Hallelujah, hallelujah._

_Hallelujah ©_ 1984 Leonard Cohen/Stranger Music, Inc


End file.
